“Then why does she have murder in her eyes?”
“That’s just her face when you’re around.”
He strokes a hand down my hair as Reese comes to a halt directly in front of us, having abandoned the people she was chatting with.
“Wow. Wow.” The condescending amusement from our conversation earlier tonight is gone, and her knuckles are white around her cocktail glass. “I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m really not.”
“It’s not your business anymore,” Wyatt replies calmly.
“I know that!” she snaps. “And you.”
When she turns to me, I straighten like it’s day one in boot camp and she’s about to make me do pushups. “What about me?”
“To think, I’ve been considering apologizing to you.” Her lips purse, as if taking responsibility for her actions gives her heartburn. “But something about seeing my ex with…” She waves her elegant, pink-tipped talons in my direction. “… with you makes me change my mind.”
Her point made, she lifts her nose in the air and takes a sip of her drink, then immediately chokes and spits it back into her glass, shattering the untouchable ice-queen vibe she just threw down.
“Ugh, why am I still drinking this?” she croaks out. “Honestly, I’m done. With both of you.”
She thrusts the glass at me, and on autopilot, I reach out to accept it. With a death stare at both of us, she yanks open her tasteful satin clutch and pulls out her phone.
“Siri,” she barks as she strides off. “Send a message to the group chat ‘Throw Away the Whole Man.’”
What do you want to say? Siri’s choppy computer voice asks, and the last we hear from Reese is her carefully enunciated, “Oh-emm-gee exclamation point. You will not fucking believe who I just saw together period.”
Wyatt and I stare after her in silence until a giggle bursts free, and I slump against his chest, still cradling Reese’s abandoned backwash drink. “Okay, that may be the greatest anti-apology in the history of anti-apologies.”
Only Wyatt Jones can frown while smiling. “But she does still owe you an apology.”
“Eh, I owe her one too,” I say. “For the whole cheating thing.”
“I knew it!” Jonesy slaps the table and turns to Liv. “Pay up!”
Wyatt looks around the table suspiciously. “How many bets do you all have going about us?”
“Not many.” Gabe’s lips move silently as he ticks a list off on his fingers. “Maybe four or five.”
“Four or five?” I ask.
“If one of you has a tattoo of the other’s name, I win a hundred bucks from everybody,” Birdy says. “So umm…” She squints at the visible sections of our skin from across the table.
Wyatt folds his arms over his chest and glares, while I just laugh. But when the rest of the table turns to their own conversations, Jonesy leans in and speaks quietly enough that only Wyatt and I can hear.
“So, my investment banker brother, was it CJ that you did but didn’t but maybe cheated on Reese with?”
“As I’ve told you a million times,” Wyatt says with weary patience, “I am not now, nor have I ever been an investment banker.”
Jonesy dismisses his protests with a wave. “You have an MBA, and you covered the costs of Mom’s surgery. That’s investment banker shit, and you can’t convince me otherwise.”
“You did?” This revelation surprises me until I think it through for another half a second, and then it makes total sense. “Of course you did.”
Good thing our chairs are close enough together that we’ve basically created a two-person bench. I melt into him, and he responds by wrapping his arms around me.
“But seriously,” I tell Jonesy, “there was no cheating. It was just a shitty thing I said to Reese because I was hurt and jealous.”
“Eh.”
Wyatt’s noncommittal noise has both of us raising our brows, especially me.
